


The Last Safe Home

by ohmyfae



Series: Dads of the Year [12]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-26
Updated: 2019-01-26
Packaged: 2019-10-16 13:06:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17550242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohmyfae/pseuds/ohmyfae
Summary: "Somewhere past the blur that is the mainland, the world is at war. But war won't come to Galahd. There's nothing for the empire here. Just the ocean, the mountains, and the great halls where statues of queens long past stare out from the stone, trembling with the songs of fishermen coming home from sea."---An Uncle Drautos AU!





	The Last Safe Home

Titus Drautos is nineteen years old, and the world beyond the archipelago is nothing but a distant smudge on the horizon. He stands knee-deep in the foam behind his mother's house and watches the fishing boats head in, their lamps snuffed, nets bulging. Songs drift across the water. He knows the words to all of them, old rowing songs his mother used to sing when she took him out to the mangrove islands that dotted the sea, her massive arms shifting with the oars. She's probably out there now, her low voice lost in the chorus.

Somewhere past the blur that is the mainland, the world is at war. But war won't come to Galahd. There's nothing for the empire here. Just the ocean, the mountains, and the great halls where statues of queens long past stare out from the stone, trembling with the songs of fishermen coming home from sea.

 

\---

 

"Hey," Libertus says. He's standing in a puddle of runoff from the highway, his boots are coming apart at the soles, and he's holding the hand of a young girl with wild eyes and the cracked lips of the dying. Her hair is a rat's nest, and she tries to glare at Titus from a mouth made rigid with panic.

"I found her in the street," Libertus says. "Her name's Crowe."

Titus slides his gaze over Libertus' open, honest face, and runs a hand through his hair. "Right," he says. He looks to Crowe, who rocks back on her bare feet. "How old are you, Crowe?"

"Sixteen," she says. 

There's a long silence. He lets her stew in it, listens to the roar of Insomnian traffic overhead, the groan of pipes in the Galahdian district settling for the night. Libertus squeezes Crowe's hand--he's just a kid himself, really, all the old rebel fighters are--and Crowe's face falls.

"I'm eleven," she whispers.

She leaves mud all over Titus' foyer, but it isn't the first time. When the war first came to Galahd, it was Mama Drautos who took in the orphans of their fishing village, Titus who helped her soothe them at night, when the bombs whistled overhead and the teenage rebels came staggering in, bloody and stinking of death. Those who survived remember, and Titus' apartment is never empty for long, a halfway house in a warren of them. 

Leo, a fifteen year old with a glass eye and a new job in the Citadel mail room, tilts his head when Crowe huddles into the living room.

"She can take my bed if she wants," he says.

"I don't need charity," Crowe snaps. Titus rolls his eyes, and Leo flaps a dismissive hand.

In the end, Titus has to cut her hair. She does cry at that, soft, silent tears that dampen her borrowed shirt, and Titus hums the morning song, the one his mother sang when the world was still whole, before the empire. Before Lucis.

"It'll grow back," he says. Crowe looks down at the lumps of matted hair on the tile and rubs her eye with the heel of her hand.

"I don't know how to do it up again. Dad only just taught me..."

Titus shrugs. "Maybe we can get you a wig," he says. "For practice."

Crowe twists around to look up at him. Without the grime and dirt of the lower city to mask her skin, she could be a kid from Titus' village. "Lib says you're Captain of the Kingsglaive."

"Libertus says lots of things," Titus says. 

"He says you know the king." Crowe's eyes narrow, sharp and calculating. Titus likes her. He hopes, deep down, that she has what it takes to survive. So many Galahdian kids don't. The world beyond the archipelago is not in their favor.

"Yeah," Titus says, and runs his soft brush through her short, ragged hair. She settles back against his legs, and for the first time since she showed up at the door, she lets herself relax. "Yeah, I know the king."

 

\---

 

"He's having nightmares again," Regis is saying to the secretary of defense, when Titus sidles into a council room to report on the Glaive's progress in the north. The council members glance at Titus sidelong, taking in his complexion, the height of his eyes, the broad, bowed back of a fisherman. He doesn't belong here, in this cold room in a dismal tomb of a palace, its halls filled with soldiers dressed like mourners on parade. He stiffens, considers heading back downstairs, and stops when a small hand grips his leg. He looks down into the eyes of a young Prince Noctis, who wavers, bleary-eyed and miserable, blinking slowly in the dim light.

"I'm sorry," King Regis says. "I'm afraid he's evaded his nanny."

Titus crouches down to get a good look at the boy. Noctis has the king's hair, but little else, and his eyes are a striking blue. "Bad dreams, huh?" Titus says. Noctis nods. "What about?"

"Your majesty," someone says. "This is hardly the time--"

"I'm on the throne," Noctis says, in a hoarse whisper. "Everything hurts."

Titus exchanges a look with Regis, who closes his fist around his ring. "Where does it hurt?"

"Here." Noct touches his chest. Titus reaches out to pet his hair--He's hardly older than the kids who take up his apartment now, the children of a young woman whose boyfriend died in a skirmish a week back. They tend to have nightmares, too. Noct leans into the friendly touch, just like they do, and Titus wonders just how lonely life must be for a young boy in this place, wandering the halls while the throne looms large in the back of his mind, inescapable.

"Your majesty," Titus says. "May I have permission to borrow your son?"

 

No one pays much mind when Titus Drautos appears at the public fishing docks on the weekends. The locals are used to the procession of kids and awkward teenagers who follow him up the boards, all jostling each other, asking for his help with a lure or a hook or with trouble at school that the teacher is too unqualified to untangle. No one looks twice at the dark-haired boy toddling at his side, either, clutching a small fishing rod for dear life. 

"You gotta cast like this," says an older girl, taking Prince Noctis' arm and waving it back. "Uncle Drautos taught me how. Back and forth."

Noct stares up at Titus, who flashes him a quick smile and demonstrates. The younger kids applaud. Noct nearly throws his rod in the water, but he catches it last minute, and he watches his bright little bobber with something like awe.

"Uncle Drautos is taking us out for popsicles after this," his worldly companion says. "He promised."

"I said no such thing, and you know it, Crowe," Titus says, but it's too late.

"Popsicles?" one of the other kids asks. "Really?"

"Can we go to the ice cream truck?" asks another.

"I want a blue one!"

Titus gives Crowe a look, and she grins. She still refuses to go out without a hat these days, and she tips her floppy brim at him and slings an arm around Noctis' shoulders.

"Told ya," she says. "Look! Your bobber's moving!"

That afternoon, Noctis manages to reel in a fish all on his own, and practically begs to be allowed to go to the docks next time. 

"I heard Julius talk about going to school," Titus hears him say, as he drags his father through the dark halls of the Citadel. "Am I old enough for school yet?"

When Noct comes to the docks with Titus the next weekend, he comes with a bag of chocolate pretzel twists, which he shares with the other kids while Titus shows him how to tease a lure across the water. His face is bright with the sun shining off the water, and Titus can tell, as Noct sits in the crowd of kids with their fishing rods and crinkling chip bags, that his world is already expanding, leaving little room in his mind for a dark, towering Citadel, a ring that shines with the light of the crystal, or an empty throne.

 

\---

 

The man in Titus' tent waits patiently, hands folded in his lap, legs crossed at the ankles. He looks like he could fall asleep here, where the light of Niflheim's bombs paints the sunset, and the Glaives who remain nurse their wounds and bury what bodies they can find. Titus can feel their deaths on his back, as though they hang there, spectral fingers digging into his skin. 

"It seems as though Lucis is running you ragged," the man says. He smiles, slow and mournful, earnest as an actor on the stage. "They let your island burn, and they use you to fight their war."

Titus doesn't answer. He doesn't say what he's thinking, that his islands wouldn't have burned if Niflheim hadn't started the fire, that it was the loss of Galahd that spurred Regis into action in the first place, that yes, he's tired, yes, he's worn to the bone, but he isn't a traitor. Not to Galahd. Not to the Galahd that lives on in Lucis, small and broken as it is.

"I need time to think," he says.

"I'm prepared to wait," says the agent of Niflheim. Titus tries not to let his apprehension show. He can't take a man who can sneak into a fortified Glaive encampment lightly. If he kills him, there may be others. If he spurns him, he might try to turn one of the other soldiers, the ones who burn with grief and hurt, ones he can exploit. 

Titus takes a long breath. He looks down at his hands.

"Alright," he says. "I'll do it."

The man smiles. "Wonderful." He stands, and extends a hand in the empty air. Drautos lets it hang there, and the man straightens. "You won't regret this," he says, and when he tips his hat, his smile goes crooked, the grin of a fox before the kill. "General."


End file.
